Sex Drive USA: On the road to sexual discovery with Stephanie Theobald

More than 40 years ago, Fear of Flying, Erica Jong’s now-legendary novel about female sexual exploration, was published. Hilarious and exhilaratingly frank, Jong’s book focused on one woman’s search for erotic, personal and political happiness. It seems that women are still on that search. Even actor Emma Watson has just namechecked a site called OMGYes, which features educational clips and articles on sex, sexuality and desire.

Forty years later, the natural successor to Fear of Flying is in the making: it’s Sex Drive, by British journalist, editor and novelist Stephanie Theobald. Theobald has undertaken a road trip across America on a hunt for greater sexual self-knowledge and an insight into the weird, counter-cultural heart of the United States.

Life is full of sex, life is full of conflict

Erica Jong

Part Jack Kerouac, part Joan Didion, Theobald brings a Londoner’s wit to what could have been a self-absorbed quest for personal pleasure and turns it into a travelogue that evokes Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.

Theobald has been releasing extracts of her adventures on her site, in tantalising bites. While there’s plenty of not-suitable-for-work shenanigans, Sex Drive is also an insight into a rarely seen aspect of America, one where eccentricity and originality can be found in the unlikeliest places.

Theobald spends time with women like Jocelyn Elders, who’s now in her eighties and more fired up than ever. As Theobald tells me, Elders “grew up picking cotton in Arkansas before rising to become Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General. She was fired by Bill Clinton at the height of the Aids crisis in 1994 for suggesting that masturbation should be talked about in schools.

"She’s 84 now and she’s on the board of Trojan, the massive American condom company. She’s unstoppable. When I asked her where she got her rebel soul from, she used the word ‘enslavement,’ she thought women and girls should have sexual knowledge and be able to take control of their lives.”

I ask Theobald what she learned from women like Elders and she enthuses, “I realised that, if you wanted to, you could do wacky things in life - things you really believed in and made you passionate. I learned that it’s okay to be cantankerous and say what you think. When I was a kid, America was always my ‘other country’. They had chewing gum, they had horses, they had Calamity Jane.”

I realised too late that I wasn’t an exhibitionist. It felt like a weird school biology lesson

I’m not sure Calamity Jane would immerse herself in the world of “masturbation, dungeons in San Francisco, dominatrixes, ‘energy orgasms’ on the hillside and Orgasmic Meditation in Los Angeles” and then return to London “talking about sex as if it was a cup of tea.”

Theobald’s motto is “not to say no to anything.” This has included an educational session in front of forty other people when “I realised too late that I wasn’t an exhibitionist. It felt like a weird school biology lesson. I’m lying naked and tied up to a table with rope, there was a naked 25-year-old on stage with me, and the audience members were these nerds asking for correct spellings of different sex toys. San Francisco is quite train spottery like that.”

Sex Drive seems a far cry from Theobald’s previous life as fashion editor at The European and senior editor and party reporter (yes, there is such a thing) at Harper’s Bazaar. But Sex Drive returns her to the voice of her four novels, Biche, Sucking Shrimp, Trix and A Partial Indulgence, which focused on the lives, loves and style of young creatives in Paris and London.

Nonetheless, her adventure starts off with a scene that could have come straight from the pen of Adrian Mole creator Sue Townsend: “I wake up in London next to my partner of 10 years, it’s a Sunday morning and the Archers Omnibus is playing. This used to be the music that signaled our weekly sexual interaction.”

The Sex Drive blog has been so successful that publishers worldwide are gearing up to bid large for what will no doubt be a rude, funny, spare-no-blushes international phenomenon.

Theobald with Annie Sprinkle, 'Artist and Ecosexual Sexecologist'

There is an obsession with sex but people are so puritanical about it at the same time

However, British publishers have been more cautious. “Society is strange,” muses Theobald when I tell her I’m puzzled by their reticence. “There is an obsession with sex but people are so puritanical about it at the same time. They say sex sells but actually it’s the negative stuff the editors like to print: the rapes, the internet porn, the middle classes who aren’t having sex any more but ho hum, let’s go and make a cupcake instead.”

A cupcake is no replacement for a witty book which sets out to explore and entertain, not titillate or intimidate. It’s also radical in its honesty about sexuality and self-pleasure. Perhaps that’s the problem. “One [British] colleague, when I told her I’d been writing a book about getting into your body, scoffed, ‘I’m quite happy not being in my body, thank you very much.’”

Hopefully weird America, with its let-it-all-hang-out frankness, can melt the British stiff upper lip and warm up some other parts too. A fearless female outlaw, Stephanie Theobald is one writer who is walking the walk and talking the talk.

She ends our interview with a final tease: “I have found it is easier to get people interested in Sex Drive by saying it’s about desire and pleasure before coming in with the whammy that it’s also about masturbation. It’s about death too, of course – but you have to read it for that.”

Extract from Sex Drive: the blog

My 78-year-old hostess in the Yucca Valley desert turns out to be the niece of Aldous Huxley. When I met her yesterday, I thought, wow, here is the ghost of my future self, to paraphrase my poet friend Lisa Luxx. I have always wanted to be the crazy lady living on the hill and here I was.

She is called Olivia de Haulleville, she’s originally from Belgium and I only found out she was Huxley’s niece when she explained that she had to leave for a few days to have a documentary made about her. It felt like a coincidence because …Huxley …was into the idea of finding enlightenment on the West coast of America and in 1932’s Brave New World comes up with the idea of Soma, which is like a modern-day Ecstasy, a drug which makes people feel blissful and which the government hands out to them so the status quo never gets disrupted.

The people in this part of the desert don’t seem to favour Soma or Ecstacy. Her next door neighbours, Olivia pointed out, have turned their house into a marijuana farm and the ones behind them have a caravan-trailer thing that she believes is being used as a Breaking Bad-style crystal meth lab. So much for spirituality in the desert.